The missing ingredient
If you are considering automated recurring billing for your MSP, and you have been doing your research, you’ll find a wide variety of solutions claiming to offer this service.
But if you look closely at the many solutions available, you’ll notice one thing missing from most…a monthly recurring billing process that is completely automated.
Why is this important?
As a managed service provider of IT services, most of your clients have likely signed an agreement for 12 months or more. Their contract is also likely divided into monthly payments.
If this is the case for your clients, you should be looking for a payment solution that will fully automate this monthly billing process. A solution that allows you set up a new client so that their recurring monthly payment is automatically transferred to your company each month, without their having to do anything.
Most autopay solutions claim to be fully automated, but even the most popular ones require customers to open an email and click on a link in order to make their monthly payment. Perhaps not a big deal in some cases, but what if that email is not delivered, or is not opened by the customer? How do you get paid?
An auto-pay system that requires your customer to open a monthly email and take some type of action is NOT fully automated.
In fact, most MSP customers with recurring monthly contracts want to set their accounts up once, at the beginning of their annual agreement, and not have to think about it again until the contract comes up for renewal.
An autopay solution that is not fully automated also does not guarantee that you will get paid on time, every time.
It gives your customer the opportunity to forget or delay their payment each month….putting you in the awkward position of having to call or email asking for it. In our opinion, a solution like this isn’t much better than mailing out a paper invoice.
Another feature that many of the so-called “automated” billing solutions leave out is the ability to automatically update contracts. After all, MSP customers frequently decide to add or change their deliverables midway through contracts. But what does this mean for their monthly billing?
Well, with most autopay solutions, you will have to start from scratch by sending that client a new agreement. What you want to look for is a solution that will automatically update the agreement to reflect the adjusted payment amount without you (or the customer) having to do anything.
One final point to consider when shopping for the right automated recurring billing software…a fully automated solution should also make these changes and reconcile automatically with whatever CRM, PSA or accounting software you are using, so that you don’t have to manually enter payments multiple times.
After all, you are looking for an automated billing system that will save you not only money, but also time.
Looking for an automated recurring billing solution that truly does it all?
Download our free e-book for free guidance on how your MSP can collect your monthly invoices, without doing a thing.
